


Man of Steel

by Bleys_Icefalcon



Series: Man of Steel [1]
Category: Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-29
Updated: 2013-04-02
Packaged: 2017-12-06 21:31:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/740386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bleys_Icefalcon/pseuds/Bleys_Icefalcon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A different version of the Superman Story</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. These chapter are untitled

Man of Steel

Chapter 1

It was the hottest summer he could remember. That anyone could remember. In fact it was the hottest summer on record. The irrigation canal from Tiffin had dried up weeks before and the corn stood brown and listless in the blistering air. Absentmindedly he tossed an under-developed husk aside as he looked over the whole of what was left of his farm. Passed down to him by his father, Kent Farm had been bleeding money for years, and its tired veins were about as dry as the arid soil. His Grandfather, Pa Kent, had set aside a significant nest egg towards the farm and his grandchildren’s educations, back in the glory days of Alternative Fuels, and before the Great Drought of 2013. Then one day Pa Kent had a day like any other, had simply gone to sleep one night and never woke up. His son was about as opposite from the old man as you could be, where Pa would be up an hour before dawn, his son would sleep in ‘till noon, leaving the chores and duties of the farm to Pa’s old Foreman; George Grovnor, and the various ranch hands. Teddy Kent had fired George and his entire crew one night only six months after Pa had passed for not minding his place after George had chewed him out for the irresponsible lazy ass he was. Teddy followed that up with a steady and sure pissing away of his inheritance, gambling at the Iroquois Reservation near Mansfield on the weekends, importing whores from Columbus and of course, maintaining his cocaine habit. Eventually he came down with stomach cancer. Strange that it was the cancer that finally drove Deira, his wife of nineteen years away. She could tolerate the whoring and gambling, but having to provide medical care for a man she viscerally could not stand was too much. She left for Columbus and never looked back – she ended up dying of an overdose in a Crack House in one of the hundreds of abandoned storefronts downtown. Care for Teddy fell to occasional visits from a Hospice Nurse out of Mansfield, who found him dead on her fourth visit. Next to the remains they found two empty bottles of Wild Turkey as well as an empty bottle of Vicadin. Teddy died just eight years after Pa.  
By this time the farm was no longer a working farm at all, the outbuildings, equipment and postage had all fallen into disrepair, the livestock sold, neglected or dead, and the fields more than four years had gone un-plowed or planted. The land changed hands and went to Teddy’s only son, a 25 year old dishonorably discharged ex-Marine staff sergeant.  
That was eleven years ago.  
Jonathan Kent was tired. At thirty six he had the worry lines of a man twice his age. His right leg continually ached from his ‘accident’ a couple years back – Martha had just showed him the tiny, perfect form of his dead daughter, her third lost child – this time due to a miscarriage, and he’d gone out on his tractor with a 12 pack of Rail. For some reason he had climbed out of the cab while the John Deer continued to chug along, when he’d slipped and fallen. He’d narrowly avoided being run over by the right year tire when he was clipped by the harrow trailing behind - nearly severing his leg halfway between the knee and ankle. He wrinkled his nose at the thought, remembering Martha fussing and pestering while he mended. It was good to be out in the sun again.  
He sighed. There wasn’t anything he could do. The crop was a loss. President Christie had managed to pull the economy out of the toilet the Democrats had flushed it down, but even the Great Negotiator couldn’t control Mother Nature. Gore, it turns out, was right. Just 30 years after his predictions of Global Warming the island nation of the Maldives was no more, swallowed by the Indian Ocean, and on average 80 feet of coastline was now submerged, on every beach of the world. Roughly a quarter of Florida was now officially part of the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico, and the City of New Orleans had been abandoned two years now, it’s levee and drainage system could do nothing against a new high tide roughly 17 feet higher than the old. He shook his head again, and turned to the south pasture and the Hydroponic Field. A left-over from the old administration, it looked like something from Star Wars. But even with its state of the art moisture reclamation system – the crops inside were suffering almost as much as the ones on the north field. High tech or not, the plants needed water, and he’d already maxed out his government grant for excess usage. Still he’d at least have a partial crop, though he’d have very little to sell – definitely not enough to cover his expenses. He’d recoup some of his loss by selling the stunted husks for feed at HC Pork in Fostoria; pigs will eat anything, but he’s still looking at red for his fourth season in a row. Something had to give.  
And he was worried it’d be his marriage.  
Martha, was… complicated. And needy. And half the time disconnected from reality. She’d lost three babies in the last five years, the first two, both boys; stillborn, this last miscarriage – a little girl - seemed to break something inside of her. Of course it didn’t help that she couldn’t stop using Methamphetamines. Three times now she’d shaken the habit, gone cold turkey, only to disappear weeks or months later for a day or two. She’d return hungry, dirty and confused.  
And strung out.  
He squinted in the sunlight looking at the house he was born in. She’s been on the wagon as far as he could tell for nearly five months now. There were three graves behind the farmhouse; Dean, Cain and Necie Kent, and Martha likely spent four to five hours a day sitting in a chair reading to them. “It will take time for her to let them go” Doc Gendry had told him. That was four months ago. Strange that it seemed to take the death of their daughter to break the rewinding drug cycle she seemed trapped in. These five months are the longest she’d been sober… since he’d known her. At the end of the day as the sun began to set, she would rouse herself and go inside and dutifully make supper, but her spark was gone. She sat listlessly as they ate, and would soon drift off to bed leaving him clean up duties. He’d talked to her about it twice, to no effect. The third time she railed on him, even blaming him for having ‘weak seed’, for not supporting her, for not wanting their children badly enough. Their discussion ended with her demanding to be left alone on the subject. Yet there she was sitting in a sundress, a book open on her lap. Sometimes she had conversations with the children, and seemed to hear them reply. Again he shook his head. He didn’t know what to do. He hadn’t had a drink since their last miscarriage. He loathed even the thought he could become like his father, and wanted to do the right thing – but everything was standing against him, almost as if God Himself had cursed the Kent’s.


	2. Actually a split first chapter

When he’d gotten the news that his Dad had finally died, he was at a forward fire station just outside the village of Malikdin in central Afghanistan. He thought he’d be relieved, even happy – instead it just filled him with the same cold rage he’d felt the day his Dad had run George off the farm. He was on watch at the time, patrolling the perimeter with some green PFC from Georgia or some shit. He’d gotten that kid killed when he walked off his post and into the village, the kid did what he was trained to do and backed him up.  
Marty, Marty Tongers  
That was his damn name. He’d walked into the village and ducked into one of the three Kwerems, or eating houses – places where local men would gather to drink tea and smoke Hookahs. This one was well known to be the place in the village where those that both sympathize with the Taliban and despise America would gather. There were fourteen men, and initially they didn’t realize what was about to happen when he opened fire with his M27. More than half the room was down before the rest started to raise their own set-aside weapons. Tongers chose that moment to commit, and opened fire as well, saving his life.  
And sacrificing his own  
Between the two of them, the entire room was sanitized in seconds, but when he turned to scream at Tongers for coming with him he stopped, eyes wide in shock, shaking him from his white rage. Tongers was sitting in the doorway clutching at his neck, choking on his own blood. One of the errant shots the fighters had gotten off had taken him in the throat. All Jonathan could do was hold him while he died. By then many curious and outraged Afghans started approaching, many armed. Again he should have died.  
American troopers arrived  
What followed was a firefight than made the next day’s evening news back in the States, it was called the Malikdin Massacre. In the confusion which followed it wasn’t even certain who’d started what – until the official inquiry, led by the Office of the Provost Marshal of the Marine Corps revealed that Staff Sergeant Jonathan Kent had left his post and without provocation opened fire on non-hostile Afghan nationals. To save face the ‘official story’ was he had gone after young Private First Class Tongers and hostilities had broken out, and that the entire village had turned out to be a Taliban hotbed. Cover story or not, his days in the Corp were over and he was summarily dishonorably discharged, and given very strict instructions not to breath a word about what had in fact actually happened - ever.  
They’d only learned what had actually happened as he was the one who told the investigators.  
His musing were interrupted when he heard the whistling sound like a high pitched trill, it sounded so much like the noise a bomb would make from some old World War II movie that he immediately found himself searching the sky. He was stunned when he saw the fireball – coming in from the west and falling at a fairly sharp angle, trailing a plume of white smoke. It was moving fast. The whistling became stronger, insistent, and was soon accompanied by a roaring, low pitched growl, like steel grinding on stone, as the meteor – what else could it be – thundered over his head to slam into the south pasture with enough force to shatter dozens of the panes on the Hydropnics building, and knocking him from his feet. He got back up and looked around, and saw Martha running toward him. Her eyes were wide as saucers, and determined. He ran to her – and when they crashed into one another she was sobbing  
“I thought I’d lost you too” she said breathlessly, clinging to him with a ferocity that surprised him. With an effort he pushed her far enough away to see her face. For the first time in months her eyes were clear of the vacancy he’d come to expect.  
“It would take more than a meteor to take me away from you Marti Gras” and then she smiled at him her smile. He hadn’t seen that smile on her face since her Senior Prom, and she’d taken him with her as her date, then a sophomore. He’d gotten lucky that night, and they’d dated right up until she was accepted to the Nursing Department at Ohio State. She’d sternly broken up with him; her logic was long distance relationships don’t work. He took his shattered heart and joined the Marine Corps the day she got on the Greyhound headed for Columbus. He didn’t expect a soul to be there when he walked off of the Navy 727 and into the MAC terminal at Wright-Patterson, so you can imagine his surprise to see Martha standing there with a ‘Welcome Home Troops’ balloon.  
On the way home to the farm he learned she’d washed out, and he’d gotten lucky again that night when she agreed to be his bride. He looked at her and smiled, and felt as if a burden had fallen away. At least for now, she was here, with him. He couldn’t help but bark out a laugh both of pent up worry and relief. She surprised him again by leaning in and cutting his laughter short with a kiss that took his breath away. Before he knew it she had his shirt unbuttoned and was pulling it over his head. All thoughts of meteors and Tongers and dying crops disappeared as he took her. Later, much later, as they pulled their clothes on they looked at the shattered glass of the Hydroponic building, then looked at each other and both of them burst out laughing.  
“It’s actually insured from ‘acts of god’ you know” he said, and they giggled some more. Taking each other’s hand they walked around the back the building and froze. A deep trench ran away from them roughly a hundred feet long, at the end of which, partially buried was the remains of what could only be called a spaceship.  
A god damned spaceship  
Jonathan Kent had spent a great deal of time reading while he was on active duty, whiling away the time, and among other things he’d been an avid reader of Asimov, Heinlein and Bova. He knew what a spaceship was supposed to look like. It was supposed to look like this.  
“We have to call someone” stammered Martha. Jonathan was inclined to agree when with a sudden hiss of escaping pressure a small hatch suddenly corkscrewed open with enough speed that it actually launched ten feet into the air, to fall to the ground with a heavy thud. Jonathan couldn’t help but think that this is where the green skinned alien steps out and demands to be taken to our leaders. That’s when they heard the crying. Martha didn’t hesitate, before he could grab her she darted forward – as he ran up to her she was reaching into the opening “Careful, we don’t know what it is” he warned.  
She turned to him, and in her arms was a pink, swaddled newborn baby boy, wrapped in a bright red blanket. He was no longer crying, instead was looking back and forth at their bewildered faces with his brilliant blue eyes.  
“What it is, is hungry” and she turned walking towards the farmhouse, she was cooing at the baby “After all you’ve been on such a long trip” he heard. He couldn’t help but smile, at least she was talking to someone that was actually there. Scratching his head he looked back at the crumpled ship. There was something else inside, something glowing. He reached in and brought out several crystals, each emitting a soft inner light, and one slightly larger one which glowed a warm red. His mind creased with concerns of radiation, but he shrugged, and turned to follow Martha, that’s when they heard the telltale thump of helicopter blades.


End file.
